Watercolor Painting for Dummies (58 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
Sometimes animals cooperate and pose for you without asking, but unless you’re a quick sketch artist and live in an animal sanctuary where you have access to any animal you want anytime you want, you probably need a camera to help you capture the details on your furry, scaly, feathered, or hidebound subject.
And then there’s the issue of black and white. Of course, animals — especially fish — come in an amazing array and combination of colors, but they’re also sometimes mostly black or mostly white. The following sections talk about the best ways to capture the details of your subject for your project and painting in black and white.
Working from live models is the best practice. There’s nothing better than to see real subjects in all their detail. But painting live is not without its frustrations. Because these models don’t stay in one pose for long, as an artist you need to work quickly. Animals move just when you need to observe something most closely.
So work with the best of both worlds: Keep a camera handy for taking a snapshot, and sketch from the live model while the animal will pose for you. Later you can work from your photograph when you no longer have the luxury of the live model. When you’re sketching, also called making a
study,
you’re becoming experienced with the subject. Familiarizing yourself by sketching is much more educational than just snapping a photo. You may just work on a part of the animal like an eye or foot — the details that often are hard to see in photographs.
Movement is difficult to capture without reference material to look at muscles and positions while drawing the shapes. So sketch with your camera. It’s a wonderful tool to explore composition by trying shots and collecting reference materials for later use. Still, take time to sketch with a pen or brush. Quick on-site sketches collect even more information, such as details, personality, and attitudes, that you can use in a painting back in the studio (even if the studio is only your kitchen table).
Working from flat photos often leads to flat paintings. Gather as much information, such as light and shadow (which help define the critter’s size and shape), as your subject will allow when working from a live model.
If you’re painting animals from life, you’re smart to limit your palette to just a few colors, say three, and work with an economy of detail. Use a light color to define the shape of the creature. After that dries a little, apply a second, darker color to capture volume and shadows. Use a still darker color to put in details like eyes, nose, and ears. By that time, your model has usually moved, and it’s time to make another quick sketch.
Figure 12-1 shows what you can do with just a few colors and some quick brushwork.
Figure 12-1:
Dog at rest.
Black and white animals present some interesting watercolor opportunities. (It’s up to you to take problems and change them into opportunities.)
Painting black animals is one of those situations where working from life is so much better than working from a photograph. I have wasted a ton of film taking pictures of black animals. Black usually gets underexposed, and the animal ends up as a silhouette with no details. But in real life, these animals have wonderful detail. Use other colors to make blacks come to life; for example, purple and blue make interesting highlights within black.
Avoid using black paint, which looks lifeless. Mix colors to create your own blacks instead. See Chapter 5 for some black recipes.
To make the color darker, use less water and add more pigment. For lighter areas, add water so the paint becomes a gray.
A polar bear raises the question: How do you paint a white animal? It’s easy! Because the white is the white of the paper, you’re almost done before you start. But keep in mind that there’s a lot of color in white and that white can reflect many colors as well. When I paint something white, I look for the opportunity to subtly place as many colors around as I can fit.
In the polar bear in Figure 12-2, I chose to add some unexpected and fun colors to the white of the fur and produce a pronounced cool and warm to the light. (This painting project is included in Chapter 13, so you can paint your own furry friend if you want.)
Figure 12-2:
A polar bear posing.
When it comes to the background, you can make the animal look whiter and stand out more distinctly by using dark colors next to the body and for the background.
Make sure the paper is dry before you use a liner brush to add dark eyes and whiskers to any animal. Otherwise, the paint will travel into damp areas when you least expect it. Look for opportunities to have a whisker be white against the dark face and become a dark whisker as it goes past the face. This transposition of value technique is described in Chapter 7.
Some folks stretch the definition of a house pet, but for this section I’m thinking of animals commonly found indoors.
Most furry, small animals fall into the “cute” category. I see nothing wrong with cute when painting furry animals.
You can paint fur several ways. Some artists paint every hair with much detail. I prefer to simplify the fur into a soft texture that defines the shape and shadows of the body. You can make curly hair especially look more free and loose by drawing it with quick, similar lines instead of laboring to slowly duplicate each line exactly. Short, choppy lines are more interesting than heavy, labored outlines anyway.
When painting fur, it’s important to know which direction it grows. Look at a cat’s face up close sometime. The hair doesn’t grow all in the same direction. If you put in this much detail, make sure it’s accurate.
My advice is to simplify the detail. It will make your entire life easier. Notice that in the paintings in this section, I don’t follow every hair in the drawings perfectly.
To make a rough hair texture, use a round brush and push the tip away from you while the paint is a little dry. Some artists like to use a specialty brush like a rake or fan. The hairs on these brushes are spread out so each hair paints an individual line, like fur texture.
Be a copycat and transfer an outline of the cat on a mat shown in Figure 12-3 onto some paper. Then paint a feline portrait.
1.
Choose a 5-x-7-inch piece of horizontal watercolor paper and trace Figure 12-3. (See Chapter 7 for more on tracing.)
2.
Activate your paints.
For this exercise, you use ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, lemon yellow, brilliant pink (or alizarin crimson with some white), cadmium orange, and a color of your choosing, if you want a different color for the rug.
Mix a puddle of ultramarine blue and a bit of burnt sienna to make a pleasing blue-gray with a lot of water in it so it’s transparent.
3.
Paint the pale blue-gray shadows and markings (see Figure 12-4a) using a pointed round brush.
Figure 12-3:
The outline for a cat on a mat.
Follow the dark areas of your tracing and refer to Figure 12-4a to paint these:
The paw farther away gets a shadow. The nearer paw gets a shadow defining the shoulder. Paint a shadow under the chin. A little shadow goes under the mouth. The eye sockets get a shadow that defines the nose. The edges of the body get a shadow that defines the roundness of the cat.
Use the same color to make a layer for the cat’s markings on the face above the eyes, on the side, and on the tail.
Soften some of the shadows in the body by adding water to fade out the edge instead of leaving it hard.
Figure 12-4:
Adding color for fur, shadows, and more.
4.
Let the shadows and markings dry.
Use a blow-dryer, or check the stock market prices while you wait.
5.
Paint the eyes.
I used lemon yellow to color the cat’s eyes (see Figure 12-4a). Shadows come in another layer later, as does the black pupil.
6.
Paint some pink in the ears and nose.
Dilute brilliant pink with water and put some at the base of the ear (see Figure 12-4b). If you don’t have brilliant pink, dilute alizarin crimson or add some white to it for a pink.
Leave some white, hair-like spaces around the ears.
7.
Let everything dry.
Use a blow-dryer for speedier drying, or go change the oil in your car.
8.
Paint the rug.
Use whatever color you want on your rug. In Figure 12-4b, I used cadmium orange mixed with burnt sienna with a lot of water in it to keep the paint transparent.
Let the paint be darker by the cat by sweeping the pigment with your brush toward the cat. I made the outside edges lighter by adding water with less pigment near the edge.
9.
Paint the gray markings on the cat.
I used a gray mixed from ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. This is the same as the shadow color used in Step 3, only with less water, so you get a darker color. You can see the results in Figure 12-4b.
10.
Shadow the ears, eyes, and nose.
Add a little cadmium orange at the center base of the ear for more depth and interest. Using the same color, create a shadow under the top eyelid and at the top of the nose as shown in Figure 12-4b.
11.
Finish the details (see Figure 12-5).
Use the tip of your brush to add all the little gray hairs you want. A liner brush makes nice whiskers. Paint the dark parts of the eyes, nose, and mouth using the dark mix from ultramarine blue and burnt sienna.
Placing orange in several places — rug, eyes, ears, and nose — balances the color around the painting. If you made the rug another color, you may want to echo that color in other places within the painting — perhaps in the background or fur or whatever you think works.
Man’s best friend can also be an artist’s best model. Pet parents love to have portraits done of their dogs. Some artists specialize in dogs in general, while others stick to painting one breed. There are national art shows that only have dogs as subject matter. If you love dogs, you might find this to be a lucrative and rewarding topic too.
Figure 12-5:
A lovely cat on a colorful mat.
